‘Her perseverance and resilience were mistaken for power madness.’
Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

When Hillary Clinton relinquished her political dream at the Wyndham Hotel on Wednesday, her voice barely quavered. She exuded grace and resilience. The woman has a true gift for giving losing speeches.

Some of her supporters, who began demonstrating on the streets to protest Donald Trump’s victory, yearned to hear something else, however. They would have preferred at least a dash of the defiant tone that Hillary Rodham struck in her famous Wellesley commencement address. In that speech, she talked proudly about how the women in her class were too young to know what was “not possible”. They were going to reshape the ruling order, a pledge that remained unfulfilled.

In some ways, her defeat was pre-ordained, despite all the polls that showed the White House well within her grasp. She has been under sustained attack from the right since her husband was elected governor of Arkansas in 1978. No one has been more reviled for a longer period of time in American politics. Although she did not run a flawless campaign, the baggage from all the attacks proved too heavy and caused the historically low trust and likeability numbers that proved insurmountable. It made the task of re-energizing the Obama coalition too daunting and depressed Democratic turnout in key battleground states.

Early on, her band of critics seized on her overt feminism and her clinging to her maiden name and legal career. In order to calm them over the next 40 years, there were several name changes (from Rodham to Rodham Clinton to plain Clinton), style transformations (from frumpy dresses to the color-coded pantsuits and new hairstyles, of course) and political sea changes from first lady (of both Arkansas and the United States), to US senator to secretary of state to two-time presidential candidate.

Her distinguished service in those posts only inflamed her haters and the constant shape-shifting earned suspicions from the Democrats who should have supported her that she was “inauthentic”. Her excellent performances in all the debates in 2016 were overshadowed by Trump’s calling her “a nasty woman”. Her fierce determination to seek the presidency a second time, eight years after being defeated by Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries, was seen as evidence that she was relentlessly ambitious. Her perseverance and resilience were mistaken for power madness.

For all of this time, the shadow of phony scandals followed her, beginning with a losing real estate venture called Whitewater and ending with her private email server. FBI director James Comey’s 99th-hour intrusion into the election, coming right as Clinton was catching a wave of momentum, seemed to seal her fate. All of these strands combined to create a literal no-win situation and her final quest may have been doomed from the start.

It’s beyond obvious to point out that almost all of the criticism and rage focused on her was laced with sexism and involved gender-based double standards. When she stayed in the background, went into listening mode and eagerly worked with older, male Republicans during her eight-year Senate tenure, Clinton got a respite. As secretary of state, she was Obama’s subservient helpmate, so the hate quieted then, too. Her position as one of the most admired women in the world was restored. But every time she sought the big prize for herself, in 2008 and 2016, the hatred and caricatures came roaring back.

Millions of dollars fortified the anti-Hillary movement. Just months after she stepped over the White House threshold as first lady, a conservative magazine funded by the multi-millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife portrayed her as a witch, in black regalia and a pointy hat. Conservative groups like Judicial Watch came after her with lawsuits. She and her husband had dared and succeeded in breaking the conservative, Republican hegemony the right had established during the Reagan-Bush years. Their fury consumed Washington DC through the failed attempt to impeach Bill Clinton.

Some of the enemies who delighted in attacking her over the decades worked directly for Trump’s election, including Roger Stone (who dates back to the Nixon campaign), David Bossie (of Whitewater vintage) and Stephen Bannon who came from the newer rightwing media bastion, Breitbart News. He was Trump’s campaign chairman and is said to be a favorite for White House chief of staff. A campaign low was when Trump brought the women who alleged mistreatment by Bill Clinton and tormenting from Hillary, his supposed enabler, to the second debate.

Hillary Clinton, even more than her husband, incited the anger of what she rightly labeled “a vast, rightwing conspiracy”. And no one understood its structure and sharp contours better than her. To arm herself, she did what she always did, she studied. She turned to trusted advisers for help, like Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist who wrote a respected book about the conservative movement and to David Brock, a turncoat whose journalism had once been funded by Scaife. They, too, were vilified, for trying to fight fire with fire and building a liberal armada to fight back on Clinton’s behalf. But she was always outgunned.

In letters to friends, Clinton expressed occasional despair over the attacks and wearying ethics investigations, all of which have melted away without any charges. She told one of her lawyers, Robert Barnett: “I am just so tired of all this.” But she always battled on.

The feminist writer Susan Faludi, author of the famous book Backlash, also recognized the daunting nature of the fight. Shortly before the election, she wrote in the New York Times: “The left needs to acknowledge what the right has long known: that it’s a fiction to think we can move on beyond the brawl of the 1990s without settling it,” adding, “and settling it requires helping Mrs Clinton triumph once and for all against the calumnies that were created to define her” as the “feminine face of evil”.

In this election, her name was coupled with Lucifer’s and Trump supporters, some dressed in orange or striped prison jumpsuits, demanded she be jailed (some even shouted that she be killed). Now that they helped bring about her political death, they will surely move on to other targets. The endless investigations of Clinton will probably, at last, end. (Trump has not said a word since the election about putting her on trial).

It is hard to be the first woman in any position of power, but Clinton was more than ready to grab the ultimate prize. On Tuesday night, in the glass encased Javits Center, her fanbase had everything set for victory, even confetti shaped as glass shards. The highest, hardest glass ceiling was about to fall.

The confetti never fell – and at the age of 69, Hillary Clinton finally faced the cold reality that she couldn’t see as a Wellesley student in 1969: it was not possible.